Travel Writing Revisited1

Abstract

In compiling the essays for this volume, Steve Clark’s main concern is a revisionist one. This collection represents a shift away from what is sometimes called the “homoglossic” obsession with Empire present in postcolonial theory, from Edward Said’s influential Orientalism (1978), through Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992), to David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire (1993). This book resists the temptation to think in terms of “the reduction of cross-cultural encounter to simple relations of domination and subordination.” Challenging Pratt, Clark describes her thesis (of travel writing producing the rest of the world for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist trajectory) as “hyperbolic”.